February 11, 2015

Tabatha Stirling

Ibambe *

There are other places in the world I
could be, Oliver Sabonne
thought. Safer places, places with less colour and less troops making their presence
known with scowls and the woodpecker chatter of gunfire.

But nowhere in the
world had ever made his heart rage like the wild and tumultuous Rwanda.

He might be the only
Western person left in Kigali. His sultry Hutu girlfriend Monica had left days
ago, stealing his grandfather’s silver cane. Her eyes had been bright with
defiance and death-lust.

He wondered how much
Tutsi blood had dried around the badges that his grandfather had collected
during his walking trips in the Swiss Alps.

The chanting of the
Hutu marchers had become so regular that he felt anxious when it ceased.

Only two days ago he watched from behind the
netting as a group of young women with the lighter Tutsi colouring, so beloved
by the Belgian Colonists, were dragged by their hair onto a waiting truck. Lips
already split, clothes torn and eyes inky black with terror.

The underworld had
been left unguarded and its demons were spilling into this city. Almost eighty
years of suppressed resentment and hatred now infecting the population.

Oliver had witnessed
UN troops in tears, hard men and women who volunteer for these posts. Their
military mileage earned in places of rape and despair from Bosnia to Haiti. He
had seen lips tremble and faces blanch at the horror and degradation of these
civil wars.

Then he heard the
footsteps on the stairwell and thuds on his door. An insistent but unruly
announcement. He looked briefly at the nine Tutsi children huddled in his small
kitchen and tried to smile for them.

The bangs on the door
were becoming imperious and as he unbolted the locks and slid chains back to
acknowledge the baying Hutu hounds outside he wondered if this was the day he
would die.

If this was the day
when the bribes of whiskey and US dollars would not work. If this day would be
when a black bag, smelling of shit and fear, would be pulled over his head –
the bloodied roots of a knocked out tooth tickling his neck.

If this day would be
the end of the nine, abandoned Tutsi children he had rescued from a
kindergarten 4 days ago.

Could he have done
more? He didn’t think so in a city where a white skin was a reminder of
colonial disgrace.

Oliver paused with
his hand on the doorknob, astonished that the door was still standing just
before the top hinge gave way and plaster crumbled around it.

The second hinge blew
shortly afterwards and a Hutu rebel, with blood stained teeth and a monstrous
machete stepped into the room. Oliver looked up into the man’s eyes and saw no
trace of mercy or even humanity.

Their collective
conscience had been burned out as effectively as a napalm bath and madness now
ruled their hearts.

*Ibambe means
mercy in Kinyarwanda.

Forty Years On

When we fell in
love it was fight in the night and bloody noses for breakfast. The taste of sin
was on everybody’s lips and a harvest of souls by the Bible Belt made smug
contributions to rural hospitals.

I may have mowed
your lawn in the sweet-sweat lines of the Mississippi but in the New York I
might have been a lawyer. Could have fandangled some of the greybacks on Wall
Street. Taken them for ride colder than the Hudson on an icicle day in
February.

I may have
chopped your kindling in the warm, honeyed shadow of the acacia tree but in
Connecticut, I could have been a poet. Salted words, cursing and spitting,
through the hipster joints and green leaf cafés. Guilted blondes sweeping my eye
line with fine hair and freckles.

I may have been
caught kissing you in the dusk of the day, with the static currents of the
God’s anointed pounding in our ears. As children, wide eyed with tiny glimmers
of thrill, meandered through our fate in boats of willow.

And we may have
fled, battered and you, bleeding a ripe, white-red from between your legs and
your hair shorn, defiant and too beautiful to mention. The shrouds of hate too
liquored up to pursue a coon and his whore much past the state line.

We never forgot,
did we, baby. Those long, faulty evenings when your vision blurred and you bit
your lip until it burst like cherry-coke on a marble floor.And we clung and
sung and watched others hand in hand and celebrated an acceptance. A fist of
triumph blazing black and everything.